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Sandy Offers Lessons to Restaurateurs

Drew Nieporent in the closed Tribeca Grill on Sunday. Its basement flooded in the storm, and power was lost.Credit
Karsten Moran for The New York Times

IN the days since Hurricane Sandy shut off the lights and flooded restaurants across New York City, the reaction has been rapid and often heroic: kitchens drained, supply lines improvised, staffs reassembled, doors reopened and beleaguered diners fed.

But for many of the city’s 24,000 restaurants, the work has just begun: a long-term overhaul that could change much about the way restaurants operate, even those untouched by the storm.

Owners are re-examining their buildings’ infrastructure and architecture. They are questioning their industry’s tradition of placing kitchens and refrigerators in basements. For the first time, many are realizing a need to set up backup power, communication systems and transportation networks.

“There is no business as usual, going forward,” Drew Nieporent said as he stood at the mahogany bar of his eerily empty Tribeca Grill on Saturday night, hours after the power returned. The restaurant has been a Greenwich Street landmark for 22 years, and Mr. Nieporent described his shock when its subbasement boiler room suddenly took on five feet of water and the basement prep kitchen filled with six inches of slosh.

“There are many lessons learned,” he said, estimating that he had lost $600,000 in revenues at three closed restaurants, and $30,000 worth of spoiled food. “We all want to be smart about this going forward. It’s a time of stocktaking, after reopening.” Which is in progress: Nobu on Saturday night, Corton on Tuesday and Tribeca Grill on Wednesday, if all goes well.

In a different part of the city and its dining spectrum, the 120-seat Bogota Latin Bistro in Park Slope, Brooklyn, suffered minimal damage. But an owner, Farid Lancheros, predicted that restaurateurs would begin reinforcing walls, installing sump pumps and making other tangible changes to deal with more-frequent and devastating storms. Hurricane Sandy “was a very ugly package presented to us with a gift inside,” Mr. Lancheros said. “Maybe now restaurants will be wiser.”

David Rockwell, who has designed more than 50 restaurants in New York, said owners would now consider building or retrofitting with waterproof materials, and providing quick ways to drain and pump out water.

“Everyone is thinking not only about backup power and emergency lighting,” he said, “but also the whole idea of what, exactly, is an acceptable ground level.” Some seating might have to be shifted downstairs, and kitchens and refrigeration moved upstairs.

Danny Meyer said his Union Square Hospitality Group, which owns 16 restaurants in New York City, was creating a disaster-plan task force, “expecting that this will happen again, and looking for backup solutions,” he said, including the purchase of generators and “a lot of infrastructure changes.”

Mr. Meyer is renowned for his tireless efforts to communicate with customers, but the storm nearly put him out of touch with his own organization last week. When the power failed at his apartment in the Flatiron district, his office at Union Square and his downtown restaurants, he said, he established himself in a makeshift office in the bathroom of the Madison Square Club gym on Fifth Avenue at 26th Street.

“For some reason they had power,” he said, adding, “there was one outlet and I plugged in, and fortunately there was a chair to sit on rather than just the toilet.”

Photo

Corton, owned by Mr. Nieporent's group, was shuttered, but reopened Tuesday.Credit
Karsten Moran for The New York Times

A top priority now, he said, is creating a stormproof communications system “because in the future you can’t have me running the company from the bathroom of a gym on one cellphone, relying on a cell tower.”

He and other restaurateurs would also benefit from a keener awareness of their own infrastructure, Mr. Meyer said. His North End Grill, Blue Smoke and Shake Shack in Battery Park City never lost power, he said, because “they were on the Brooklyn electrical grid, and who knew?”

Even small design changes could make a big difference, he said. North End Grill was “the first of our restaurants to install electrical outlets underneath the lip of the bar, and suddenly, all our customers were coming in to recharge their equipment — something we never envisioned.”

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Restaurants with employees who are scattered over the region are brainstorming new ways to reach them in a crisis, and investigating van-pooling and other transportation, including bicycling. Juan Inga, a floor captain at Nobu, couldn’t find gasoline for his car, so he cycled an hour from his home in Jackson Heights, Queens, to the TriBeCa restaurant. “It’s windy and pretty cold across the 59th Street Bridge,” he said, “but the bike got me in.”

Restaurateurs have also realized they must be more sensitive to the trauma of employees after they return to work.

Sam Del Toro, the assistant manager of the Schnipper’s Quality Kitchen outlet on West 23d Street, had two feet of water in his house in Bergen Beach, Brooklyn. He organized a cleanup, then contrived to return to work on Wednesday, only to find a powerless, gas-less restaurant with 280 pounds of spoiled meat. “I know what our people are going through,” he said. “It’s — well, I’ve never experienced anything like this.”

Anxiously, too, the industry is casting an eye on the viability of individual businesses in the post-storm economy. “There has been a devastating financial impact,” said Andrew Rigie, executive director of the New York City Hospitality Alliance, a trade group of more than 300 restaurants and bars. “Long term, it’s very challenging.” His organization has become a clearinghouse for relief and recovery information.

Malcolm M. Knapp, a New York restaurant consultant, said the storm’s penumbra “is going to cut tourism in the short run, as well as trade shows, and hotels will be down, and all of that affects restaurants.” He added that during storm week, sales in casual-dining restaurants were down 30 percent in the metropolitan area, and 50 percent in fine-dining restaurants.

Jeffrey Bank, the chief executive of the Alicart Restaurant Group, which owns Carmine’s and Virgil’s, projected that “many restaurants will go under, due to this. It’ll be like a Chinese water torture: a slow drip.”

Most people interviewed for this article invoked a Dickensian metaphor: a tale of two cities — those restaurants affected by the storm, and those not. But they declined to speculate whether future entrepreneurs might avoid opening restaurants in flood-prone neighborhoods like Battery Park City, and Red Hook and Dumbo in Brooklyn.

“If there is expensive residential property there, as in Battery Park and Dumbo, well, you have to eat,” said Clark Wolf, a restaurant consultant based in New York. “Operators could find it worth the risk.” Red Hook, which is less affluent, might be more affected, he added. Rising insurance costs could also hurt some areas, he said. “Premiums don’t have a tendency to go down.”

Despite all the talk of looking ahead, many restaurateurs will shrug off the storm as an isolated event, saying, “ ‘These things are out of our control,’ ” said Paul Seres, an owner of the DL lounge and the new Dinner on Ludlow restaurant, on the Lower East Side. The two businesses lost about $100,000 in revenues for five shuttered days.

Mr. Nieporent said that calamity was nothing new to New York restaurateurs, mentioning the 9/11 attacks, the recent recession, Tropical Storm Irene and last year’s Halloween snowstorm. “But as they said in ‘The Godfather Part II,’ this is the business we’ve chosen.”

A version of this article appears in print on November 7, 2012, on Page D3 of the New York edition with the headline: Sandy Offers Lessons to Restaurateurs. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe